Leap second festival

Festival program

Saturday, 30th June 23:59:60 (UTC), the first Leap second festival took place. It lasted until the 1st of July 00:00:00 (UTC). Within this leap second all the works of the festival were exhibited and performed.

Most works were shown in digital format and using the net as their venue, though their content might as well refer to other formats, venues and domains - whether online, offline, outline, site, on-site, non-site (or how we prefer). The festival is a distributed event coordinated on the net.

Most works lasted one second. Though some were time-independent (in format), the basic idea of a miniature work that can be exhibited/performed within one second is followed.

Since the festival only lasts one second, everything has to be shown simultaneously. So, Saturday at midnight, 30th June 23:59:60 (UTC), people going to the Leap second festival site were able to see all the works executed, exhibited, and performed (or what it took).

In reality, the festival is an event that happens in a particular time, and not in any particular place. And since we all share the same time living on this free oscillating ball, disregarding relativity theory for the moment, the festival actually took place everywhere and at the same time. We earthball-people operate with timezones, so care had to be taken to check when 30th of June 23:59:60 (UTC) was likely to happen in your temporary zone (autonomous or not), because the leap second did not occur on June 30 everywhere. To know the difference, have a look at what UTC time is and compare to your clock.

With this in mind, we proceed to the festival program, and have a look at what happened during the leap second.

All @ 23:59:60

A number of video and visual works were shown. A mini movie with and without media by Paul Wiegerinck investigates the minimal requirements of the movie media. Bending Time and Space 1 Second for 10 Times by Jyrki Kirjalainen explores the perceptional illusion of time contraction through a repetition of a one-second sequence of the earth exploding. Change Brief Abridged by Anthony Stephenson is a series of motion studies based on the multi-paneled painting titled "Change - 3 Coins 64 Times". Martin Howse describes in container//mpeginmpeg a set of content-free, protocol-driven code objects which are embedded Russian-doll-style within themselves, in this instance one single video frame, and further explains, "The code for each object (commandline, Python or C code) is self-consciously literal, describing the process as algorithm without shortcuts. The container project embraces the use of the quine with any compiler considered as an embedding device. Future container examples will extend to include film-in-film and pornography-in-pornography. The container project raises the question of where any protocol boundaries for embeddings can be established". Irena Kalodera's film suite I-II can be considered, in the festival's opinion, self-referencial 'motion pictures' and meta-framing. millisecond(s) by Jesse Scott is an executable/applet of generative, random programming.

Event/intervention. During the light intervention En un clin d'œil (23h 59m 60s) by Elisabeth S. Clark, 218 street lampposts in Bad Ems, Germany, were simultaneously switched off as a split-second negation of light. This single second non-(street)light orchestration is ephemeral but nevertheless signaled and questioned the very measurement and distribution of time. At the leap second, Elisabeth S. Clark proposed that Bad Ems encounter a glimpse of non-time.

Music, sound, and audio related work embrace many different types of work. With Leap Second Split the sculptor Sissel Berntsen in an action recorded the sound of a 13100 kg piece of black diabase stone splitting in the moment of the leap second. This action took place in Johansen Monumenthuggeri, Skjeberg , Norway.

Frenchmebeer by Jurgen Trautwein AKA jtwine is ordering a draft beer in french. Jaa Nee - Yes No by Karl Heinz Jeron, a computer voice, a possible reference to Joseph Beuys, the bible, the digital, or all... . Daniel Kelley was for this 25th leap second presenting the musical score L25, A Free Oscillation of Earth During the Leap Second of 30 June 2012. In the informal notes, L25 for dummies he says about the work, "Using the Earth as a model of a couple of large bells, which can be excited by a Great earthquake, such as the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman, one of the bells represents the uniform ringing of the atomic time scale, the other bell beats slightly out of phase based on the prediction of change the Earth rotation rate between 29 and 30 June." Another poignant sound work for the festival, concerning global instability and precarity (whether political or physical), was The sound of money by A. Andreas (Andreas Maria Jacobs). This is the sound of 5 years Germany daily electricity prices from 2008 - 2013, squeezed to 1 second and compressed to the audible frequency range.